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THE ROOKIE; A New Job Altered By Grief From Day 1

THERE is a photograph of Brogan Healy taken on his last day at the New York City Fire Academy. It is one of those embarrassing shots that shows him posing stiffly at the back of a fire truck. He is standing in his gear and looks so overjoyed that his big, proud, happy smile barely seems to fit on his face.

The album that holds the picture has a brief dedication in front written by his kid sister, Caroline, in a rounded, girlish script.

''You've become the firefighter you've always wanted to be,'' it says. ''What better job for Brogan Healy than one that saves lives every day?''

The album is usually stored in the bottom drawer of a bookshelf filled with titles like ''The American Fire Station'' and ''Report From Engine Co. 82,'' but the other day he pulled it out to show it to a new acquaintance. They were grilling rib-eye steaks on the deck of his home near the ocean, and the smells of a fading summer had made for a pensive mood.

No one had any idea, of course, but the distance between the afternoon of Sept. 8 last year and his first day on the job three days later changed everything for Firefighter Healy. He had joined the Fire Department wanting to be part of its fraternity, but his first day -- and the entire year that followed -- was not about fraternity so much as 343 dead men and their ghosts.

''My first day at the firehouse was silent,'' he said earlier this summer in the tiny front room of his current post, Ladder Company 40 in Harlem. Taped above the window was a portrait of Kevin Reilly, one of the men from that unit who died the day the towers came down.

''My first-year experience was unmatched. I can't blame the guys for anything, but the treatment I got was kind of different than I expected. Nobody was all that eager to know my name.''

A firefighter's probationary year is normally full of jokes and hazing and broken chops. Normally, he is persecuted pleasantly and made to mop the floor. This year has been anything but normal.

The department Brogan Healy always longed to join is no longer quite the one that first attracted him. It is broken and healing slowly. Its traditions and spirit of brotherhood are only now on the mend.

The tragedy of September 2001 was followed by months of grieving, waves of guilt, bouts of second-guessing and endless attention from the public and the news media. Finally, this summer, normality has started creeping back like a kicked dog who has licked its wounds and wants to come home.

But as with any cycle of mourning, the anniversaries are painful. The logic of time breaks down: a full year feels so much closer, so much harder, than 10 or 11 months.

Firefighter Healy has accepted a strange fate -- that what should have been the best day of his life is universally considered to be the worst.

''You hear guys talking about their first fire, their first job, like it was some kind of huge event,'' he said. ''My first day didn't feel like a job. It felt like reporting to a war zone.''

Firefighter Healy is quick to say that he is not complaining. Bitterness would be in poor taste, given that he is still alive and that some of the veterans he works with lost 40 or 50 friends.

Instead of complaints, he offers his experiences of the year in which the world collapsed. He has no nickname yet, and most of the men he works with have no idea about his first day on the job. They do not know much about him beyond the fact that he is a laid-back surfer boy from Northern California. They remember that he ran out of money on a company trip to Florida and that, once, while relaxing behind the firehouse, he was the butt of a practical joke: a pail of water was tossed in his face while he slept.

There is not much more than that as far as memories go.

For those who do not know him yet, Brogan Healy is 24 years old, and he was born in Santa Cruz to a family of firefighters. His uncle served with the local Fire Department, and his grandfather worked on the job in San Francisco. He grew up with a fleet of Tonka fire trucks and dressed as a fireman every Halloween.

He always wanted to work in New York City because, as everybody knows, he said, the New York department is the best. In April 2001, he got the letter telling him he had been accepted to the Fire Academy. He had already finished a two-year fire service degree from a community college in Chico, Calif., and half of the course work for a history degree from Chico State University.

He graduated first in his class at the academy and was sent, temporarily, to Ladder Company 34 in Washington Heights. It was a busy company, and he adored it. He had few good friends then except for bar friends and his fellow recruits, but on Sept. 8, he got ready to jump into his new life with a pair of booted feet.

Three days later, his boots landed atop the smoking ruins. He recalls a backhoe, and when its cylinder popped, a void in the rubble. He was green as uncut grass, and seven corpses were lying beneath the steel. (He said his company lost a half-dozen men that day.)

Firefighter Healy knows his own story is no more terrible or searing than the next man's. The difference is that the next man was not a rookie on his first day on the job.

He didn't know too many of the men who died, but he suffered all the same. The magic of his rookie year was darkened by the shadow of the towers. He doesn't feel cheated, and he doesn't feel robbed. He feels a little hamstrung.

His official graduation on Nov. 1 was something of an anticlimax, for example.

''For everybody else, graduation is the most important day of their lives,'' he said. ''It's when you say, 'I'm a fireman, at last.' '' What, then, were September and October -- those weeks of digging on the pile -- if not a graduation of the cruelest sort?

When he set foot in Ladder 40 in November, he brought a cake. They were burying Kevin Reilly, one of three men from the unit who died. The gifts and regular shenanigans that should have bonded man to man seemed patently absurd.

''The new guys, they missed out on a lot,'' said George Joos, who after 20 years in Ladder 40 has earned the title of senior man. ''They didn't get broken in properly. Guys weren't exactly in the mood.''

Brogan Healy doesn't like to talk about the dead. This is not out of fear or nervousness, but out of respect. He did not know Kevin Reilly or John Giordano or Chuck Margiotta, so what can his words convey except for the most generic type of sympathy?

''It's kind of like going to the funeral of your great aunt,'' he explained. ''You've heard the stories that grandma told, but you have no real connection. All you know is that a part of your family died.''

Kevin Reilly's father, George, worked at Ladder 40 during his own days in the department. Sometimes, he turns up at the firehouse or accompanies the men to a baseball game. Whenever the man comes by, Firefighter Healy gives him room.

''What can I say to the guy's father?'' he asked. ''I'm sorry? I feel bad? You could almost say I took his kid's spot. I don't know how to deal with this. Who does?''

BROGAN HEALY does not seem to be dealing with it poorly, and he says he is not dealing with it poorly, although he does admit that it was hard, as the new guy without many close friends in New York, to do things like sit inside the Marriott Hotel for a night with a mounted videocamera, scanning the rubble for body parts, and then go home to his rented room in Queens, where there was no one for him to dump his anguish on.

He could not exactly unburden himself by calling his best friend in Chico. ''What was I going to tell him? I found a leg with some cartilage today?''

Less than a month after joining Ladder 40, he and several other firefighters received a free trip to France, a sympathy gesture of the French government. It was six days of banquet halls and brandy and military night flights over Paris. The men of Ladder 40 still tell strangers, ''Yeah, they sent the probie off to France.''

It made him more than a bit uncomfortable; then again, he had not volunteered for the trip.

''I thought, 'Why me? Do I deserve to be away like this?' They treated us like kings. Why not take George Joos? Who the hell am I?''

His year has been like that. The unspeakable first day. The weeks of bloody baptism. The months of slowly working himself into the tattered fabric of his house.

Who the hell am I?

Even with everything that has happened, he is staying. Quitting was never an option. It is still the best job in the world, he said. One of the strangest things, however, is that the best job in the world doesn't quite touch him as he figured it would.

A few weeks ago, a woman jumped to her death from a sixth-floor window, and Ladder 40 got the call. Firefighter Healy saw her body on the sidewalk.

''I never told anyone until right now,'' he said, ''but after everything I've been through, it kind of felt like no big deal.''

There wasn't much to say after that, so Brogan Healy closed his photo album and set it back inside the bottom drawer.